Ethnographies of Waiting Ethnographies of Waiting Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty Edited by Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak First published 2018 by Bloomsbury Academic Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Manpreet K. Janeja, Andreas Bandak and Contributors, 2018 Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Adriana Brioso Cover image © Westend61/Getty Images Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. ISBN 13: 978-1-474-28028-0 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-350-12681-7 (pbk) Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements Foreword Craig Jefrey vi vii xi xiii Introduction: Worth the Wait Andreas Bandak and Manpreet K. Janeja 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Great Expectations?: Between Boredom and Sincerity in Jewish Ritual ‘Attendance’ Simon Coleman Hope and Waiting in Post-Soviet Moscow Jarrett Zigon Time and the Other: Waiting and Hope among Irregular Migrants Synnøve Bendixsen and Tomas Hylland Eriksen Waiting for God in Ghana: Te Chronotopes of a Prayer Mountain Bruno Reinhardt Providence and Publicity in Waiting for a Creationist Teme Park James S. Bielo Waiting for Nothing: Nihilism, Doubt and Diference without Diference in Post-Revolutionary Georgia Martin Demant Frederiksen Not-Waiting to Die Badly: Facing the Precarity of Dying Alone in Japan Anne Allison 41 65 87 113 139 163 181 Aferword Ghassan Hage Index 203 209 List of Illustrations 5.1 Exhibit display at Te Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. Photo by author 141 5.2 Ark Encounter in Williamstown, Kentucky. Photo by author 144 5.3 Pre-food mural at Ark Encounter. Photo by author 151 5.4 Example of Dragon Legends display case at the Creation Museum. Photo by author 155 Contributors Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. A specialist in contemporary Japan, she studies the interface between material conditions and desire/fantasy/imagination across various domains, including corporate capitalism, global popular culture and precarity. Allison is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994), Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (1996), Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006) and Precarious Japan (2013) She is currently conducting research on new demographic/social trends in Japan involving death, solo sociality, and self- management of (one’s own) mortuary and post-mortem arrangements. Andreas Bandak is an Assistant Professor in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on Christian minorities in Syria and the themes of prayer, the power of examples, and the stakes of co-existence. His work has been published in a number of prominent journals, including Current Anthropology , the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute , Ethnos and Religion and Society . He has also co-edited the volumes Politics of Worship in the Contemporary Middle East (with Mikkel Bille, 2013) and Qualitative Analysis in the Making (with Daniella Kuzmanovic, 2014). Synnøve Bendixsen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen (Norway). Her research interests include irregular migration, political mobilization, Islam and Muslims in Europe, the study of inclusion and exclusion, and processes of marginalization. She has written a number of articles, book chapters, and edited volumes and one monograph: The Religious Identity of Young Muslim Women in Berlin (Brill, 2013). Bendixsen has been a visiting scholar at COMPAS (Oxford) and New York University. Since 2013 she has been the co-editor of the Nordic Journal of Migration Research James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University. He is the author of Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Bible Study (2009), Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity Contributors viii (2011), Anthropology of Religion: The Basics (2015); editor of The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism (2009); and curator for the digital scholarship project Materializing the Bible . As a teacher-scholar at Miami University, Dr Bielo teaches courses in cultural and linguistic anthropology, ethnography, religion, American communities, and transnationalism. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, and President-elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. His research focuses on Pentecostalism, pilgrimage and cathedrals, and he has worked in Sweden, Nigeria and England. He is co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research. Publications include The Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity (2000) and The Anthropology of Global Pentecostalism and Evangelicalism (co-edited with Rosalind Hackett, New York University Press, 2015). Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and PI of the ERC AdvGr project ‘Overheating: An anthropological history of the early 21st century’. He has carried out research in several locations on the dynamics of cultural and social identities in complex societies undergoing rapid change, and has also directed large-scale projects on migration and diversity in Norway. His textbooks in anthropology, including Ethnicity and Nationalism (1994); Small Places, Large Issues (1995); Globalization: The Key Concepts (2007) and A History of Anthropology , are widely translated and used. His latest books are Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (2015) and Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016). Martin Demant Frederiksen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cross- Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Georgia since 2005 and Bulgaria since 2015 and published on issues such as urban planning, youth, crime, temporality and ethnographic writing. His current research concerns the roles of nothingness and meaninglessness in social life. Recent books include Young Men, Time and Boredom in the Republic of Georgia (2013) and Georgian Portraits: Essays on the Afterlives of a Revolution (2017). Ghassan Hage is the University of Melbourne’s Future Generation Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published widely in the comparative anthropology of nationalism, multiculturalism, racism and migration. His work fuses Contributors ix approaches from political economy, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. He is currently working on two ARC supported projects: ‘The experience and circulation of political emotions concerning the Arab–Israeli conflict among Muslim immigrants in the Western world’ and ‘The Politics of Negotiation’ as a critical way of reconceiving inter-cultural relations. He is the author and editor of many works, including Waiting (2009), White Nation (2000) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). Manpreet K. Janeja is Associate Professor at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her research focuses on trust, food, cities, migration and diversity in South Asia and Europe. She is the author of Transactions in Taste (2010), co-editor of Imagining Bangladesh (2014), and her next book, The Aesthetics of School Meals: Distrust, Risk and Uncertainty , is in the works. She has been a Eugénie Strong Research Fellow in Social Anthropology at Girton College, University of Cambridge, a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University (Centre for South Asia), and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Social Policy, London School of Economics. Craig Jeffrey is the CEO and Director of the Australia India Institute, and former Professor of Development Geography and Official Fellow at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Currently leading a large ESRC-funded project on educated unemployed youth in South Asia, he also writes on Indian democracy, educational transformation, globalization and the ‘social revolution’ that he sees occurring across twenty-first-century India. He has authored numerous journal articles and six books, including Timepass: Youth, Class and the Politics of Waiting in India (2010), and contributes regularly to BBC Radio 4, The Guardian and the Australian Financial Review . He was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Bruno Reinhardt holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (2013). He was a research fellow at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and is currently a post-doc at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. His projects have focused on religious conflict and pluralism in Salvador, Brazil, and religious pedagogy among Pentecostal ministers in Ghana. He is author of Espelho ante Espelho: a Troca e a Guerra entre o Neopentecostalismo e os Cultos Afro-Brasileiros em Salvador (2007) and has published articles on anthropological theory and the anthropology of religion and secularism. Contributors x Jarrett Zigon is the William and Linda Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the anthropology of moralities and ethics, relationality, political activity, and the relationship between anthropology and philosophy. These interests are taken up from the perspective of an anthropology strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, and are explored in his most recent book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of World-Building (forthcoming, 2017). Preface and Acknowledgements This volume initially took off from a panel on Ethnographies of Waiting , organised by Manpreet in June 2014, at the ASA Decennial Conference held in Edinburgh. We are enormously grateful to the other panellists who were there, and who contributed so much to our thinking, but for one reason and another have not been able to be part of this volume, indexical of some of the types and entanglements of waiting analysed in the book itself. They, and the discussant, were a great spur to our project. The reader will find the papers mentioned in the Introduction. Manpreet would like to thank her co-editor Andreas Bandak for joining this book project and waiting together as the volume took shape. Her utmost gratitude to Marilyn Strathern, Michael Herzfeld, David Lewis and Willem van Schendel for their engagement and encouragement along the way. She would like to thank Słren Młlgaard Rantzau at the Department library for making books magically appear at critical junctures, and to Morten Bech for his timely interventions. She owes a warm thank you to: Ildikó Bellér-Hann, Karishma Jain, Felix Steffek and Kostas Vlassopoulos for all those conversations, discussions on waiting, and meals together; and to a certain perceptive conversation on ‘eggs benedict’ that made such a difference. To her family who have been waiting patiently for this book – thank you. And especially to her parents and Maeve, who have taught her how to wait. Andreas would like to thank Bruno Reinhardt, Catharina Raudvere, James Bielo, Martin Demant Frederiksen, Lars Hłjer, Simon Coleman and Sune Haugbłlle for their engaged collaboration and thinking on this and other projects. Likewise, he would like to thank Ghassan Hage for stimulating conversations over the years – and for taking on the task of writing such a succinct Afterword. He thanks his co-editor Manpreet K. Janeja for the joint efforts in making this volume materialize. Planning and working may not always have been easy in this process, however the hope remains that the thoughts presented here will prove themselves to be worth the wait. We would like to thank all the contributors who entered this conversation on waiting and took it forward. Thank you for joining in and for contributing with such engaged papers. We really appreciate Craig Jeffrey for writing such an Preface and Acknowledgements xii incisive Foreword. We are grateful to the team at Bloomsbury, especially Jennifer Schmidt, Miriam Cantwell, Clara Herberg and Lucy Carroll, for their patience and work in bringing this volume to fruition. Manpreet K. Janeja and Andreas Bandak Copenhagen, 30 June 2017 Foreword Craig Jefrey In his book The Sense of an Ending , Frank Kermode asks the reader to consider the ticking of a clock. Each tick is identical. But the mind’s ear imposes an order on the sounds. We imagine the ticks as two distinct types: ‘tick’ and then ‘tock’. As Kermode puts it in his brilliant prose: ‘Tick is a humble genesis; tock the feeble apocalypse’. Kermode goes on to discuss the different qualities of time that our ordering of the ticking noises produces. The short interval between tick and tock is full of expectation. It corresponds with what the Greeks termed ‘kairos’: meaning, filled time. By contrast, the interval between tock and tick corresponds to ‘chronos’ in Greek terms. It is simply dead time, empty successiveness. As a literary critic, Kermode is interested in how authors construct a tick tock in their novels and plays. And he is also interested in how they subvert narratives. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is paradigmatic, the characters moving awkwardly between a sense of kairos and chronos – waiting one moment, languishing in dead time the next. ‘That passed the time,’ the character Vladimir comments at one point in the play. ‘It would have passed anyway,’ his friend Estragon deadpans back. The authors of this volume are interested in how people construct tick tocks in different places and at different times. Many of the young people with whom I have worked in north India were brought up with a regular procession of tick tocks characterizing their lives. They took tests in school, for example, and they typically passed and graduated to the next class. But these young people were unlucky enough to come onto the job market at a time when graduate employment was extremely scarce. They often responded by waiting. They stayed focused on the tock. Primed to hope. But doubt started creeping in. Time rushed in on their consciousness, and young people became preoccupied with managing ‘dead time’. Timepass became the watchword, not the pleasurable diversionary activity implied by the English word ‘pastime’, but the dreadful emptiness of a Godot-like existence. Foreword xiv ‘What are you doing?’ I ofen asked my informants. ‘Nothing’ came the reply. ‘Nothing?’ I persisted. ‘Timepass’, they said. This rich and complex edited book provides a compendium of modern timepass. Andreas Bandak and Manpreet Kaur Janeja should be congratulated for their work. I want to pick out four important themes in the collection, also nicely described in different terms by Bandak and Janeja in their authoritative introduction. First, the book charts the sheer diversity of ways in which people in different parts of the world experience time and, within that, engage with the business and art of ‘waiting’. Social hardship associated with a lack of security, housing, work and education has propelled increasing numbers of people into situations in which they are forced to wait, often indefinitely. A challenge for scholars is to explore how this sense of waiting is experienced, while also attending to the wider structures that shape people’s apprehension of waiting, and, at the same time, remaining sensitive to surprising differences and unexpected similarities across contexts. Second, the volume shows that waiting is not simply imposed on people – even if this is how it must feel to Vladimir or Estragon or unemployed young men in India. People actively and creatively invent ways of passing time and ‘waiting’, as beautifully illustrated in several chapters in this volume and discussed in the Introduction. Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Synnłve Bendixsen’s elegant ethnography of Palestinians in Oslo is especially strong on this point. These authors chart in detail how their research subjects reorder local time to create a sense of ‘tick tock’, even in unpromising circumstances. Third, the book exposes the importance of waiting as a type of methodology. This is a fascinating and rich theme, and I expect to see a series of geographical and anthropological projects that explore how ‘ethnographic waiting’ can serve as a basis for understanding social change. Finally, what this volume does superbly well – and I think it will be one of its long-term signal contributions – is to get the reader to think in earnest and in different contexts about how people shift from a sense of purposeful waiting to a purposeless inertia and back again. We learn about stoicism, persistence, perseverance and patience, but we also learn about ennui, listlessness, timepass and inertia, and – crucially – we learn about how people move from being engaged in the first set of activities to the second set, or vice versa. We Foreword xv also learn about the political stakes and struggles associated with what gets labelled, say, as ‘patience’ and what gets classed simply as ‘loitering’. Waiting emerges as an unstable object and uncertain terrain that occurs within fields of power. Waiting is not an absence; it is the grounds for having fascinating conversations about suffering, modernity, agency and difference. Kermode himself would be fascinated. Introduction: Worth the Wait Andreas Bandak and Manpreet K. Janeja Waiting is a ubiquitous and familiar phenomenon. It could even be said that waiting is an integral part of human life. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of waiting is just beginning to be taken up as a theme of ethnographic enquiry in its own right in recent social and cultural anthropological work. It is noteworthy that we have had to wait all these years for an active, focused engagement with such a pervasive phenomenon. In this edited volume, we aim to explore various modalities of waiting. Our central claim is that waiting must be conceptualized both as figure in its own right as well as a trigger for various forms of social energies. Waiting, we therefore propose, must be scrutinized in relation to the central figures of hope, doubt and uncertainty. Waiting is a particular engagement in, and with, time. For a period, short or extended, an individual or a collective finds itself placed in a situation where what is hoped for or anxiously anticipated has not yet been actualized. This period allows an exploration of what Hannah Arendt designated as ‘the human condition’ (1998 [1958]). Arendt wrote of ‘man’s’ relation to time in Between Past and Future (1993 [1968]: 11): Seen from the viewpoint of man, who always lives in the interval between past and future, time is not a continuum, a fow of uninterrupted succession; it is broken in the middle, at the point where ‘he’ stands; and ‘his’ standpoint is not the present as we usually understand it but rather a gap in time which ‘his’ constant fghting, ‘his’ making a stand against past and future, keeps in existence. Only because man is inserted into time and only to the extent that he stands his ground does the fow of indiferent time break up into tenses. We are grateful to James Bielo, Marilyn Strathern, Martin Demant Frederiksen, Michael Herzfeld and Simon Coleman for their incisive comments and suggestions. All infelicities remain our own. Ethnographies of Waiting 2 While we would be reluctant to write of ‘man’ in the same way as Arendt does in this passage, she captures something important, namely that modernity places human beings in a particular relation to time. In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces. Arendt concedes that this conception is not a solely modern phenomenon, rather the gap may coexist with human beings as such (1993 [1968]: 13). For Arendt, the gap in which human beings find themselves is not related to the figure of waiting. The gap, in her understanding, is where thought and action can take place in a ‘constant fighting’. Given that Arendt’s is a particular modernist conception of time, and of life as being lived in an ‘interval between past and future’, more ground needs to be covered in order to understand the ‘human condition’ in all its diversity as well as potentials that variously conceived temporalities and temporal gaps and intervals might afford for social and cultural life. In these variegated temporal engagements, it is important to explore how and when this is experienced as a passive waiting or when this is an active waiting for something (Marcel 1967; Crapanzano 1985; Hage 2009). In other words, waiting as a concept enables us to explore ethnographically what forms action, thought and social relationships acquire in diverse engagements in, and with, time. Conversely, we need to explore what forms of thinking, acting and relating are shunned, occluded or neglected when situated in these temporal configurations. What happens, we ask, when such temporal relations, gaps and intervals shift from being temporary phenomena to more permanent and pervasive figures, when – to paraphrase Veena Das (2016) – they may even become a form of life? What happens to the experience of time and the capacity to wait in variegated configurations of power, new technological inventions and legal regulations? And to follow up on Arendt’s argument above, how do gendered roles and cultural ideals form repositories to persist, endure and deal with waiting, or we might ask, how is waiting itself regularized by particular cultural norms? How can we use the ethnographic method and the various forms of waiting it entails in exploring the phenomenon of waiting? How do we, as anthropologists, work, plan and also wait in the crafting of our analyses? How are we to assess when something is worth the wait, and how do we act and think while we are at it? The phenomenon of waiting needs further unpacking, as the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel points out in his seminal text ‘Desire and Hope’ (1967). Inspired by Christian theology, Marcel distinguishes between desire, on the one hand, which is intrinsically insatiable, impatient and does not tolerate any form of delay (1967: 280), and hope, on the other, which involves waiting. In waiting, ‘we will have to recognize the existence of a range which goes from inert 3 Introduction: Worth the Wait waiting to active waiting’ (1967: 280). In instances of inert or passive waiting, there is a general feature of confidence in the outcome or, at times, perhaps an indifference to it. Hence, one is capable of biding time, and awaiting the anticipated outcome more or less patiently, without necessarily being particularly anxious about the outcome. However, in the moment this certitude is lost, an ‘interior debate’ arises. Such an internal tension is, according to Marcel, emblematic of active waiting. And when such an internal debate dies out we may see despair taking over, despair as the closed and inevitable outcome of a situation. Active waiting, on the other hand, keeps open what is anticipated, and therefore entails hope understood as generative of action (1967: 282). Such a conceptualization of the intricate interplay between different forms of waiting, or a range of waiting as Marcel puts it, is significant, and calls for further exploration. It is in this interplay that we find a way in the interstices of collective and individual forms of waiting, a way in between modalities of waiting that opens up for what could be called the politics and poetics of waiting (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986). We shall return to these dimensions of waiting in due course, but here we suggest some preliminary directions. By the politics of waiting, we refer to engagements with the structural and institutional conditions that compel people to wait. Waiting has been, and is increasingly used as, an instrument to elicit particular forms of subjectivities, or as a weapon to make existence intolerable for certain groups such as refugees and asylum seekers trying to obtain the right papers (Gaibazzi 2012; Andersson 2014a: 796). While this dimension of waiting is an important avenue for research, we argue that it must be complemented with a focus on the poetics of waiting. By the poetics of waiting, we refer to the existential affordances of being placed in temporal relations, gaps and intervals where the outcome is uncertain. Following Herzfeld’s use of social poetics, we do not see this move as a matter of aestheticizing social life but rather one of situating semiotic qualities, the active use and reading of signs, social performances as well ambiguities and undecidedness in the midst of human endeavours crossing individual and collective forms of action (2005: 23ff., 2016; see also 1985: 10). It is important to bring these dimensions into the conversation on waiting as we are thereby allowed to scrutinize how people in ostensibly similar conditions still experience and deal with them differently. Waiting may both forge innovation and creativity as well as destroy the persons waiting. It is this uncertain interplay that this volume sets out to explore. The central ethnographic and anthropological impetus for this edited volume is not to side with either a structural and institutional perspective or an existential one but rather to foster a conversation between them.